As The Killing returns to TV why our appetite for foreign sleuths shows no sign of waning

As The Killing returns to TV why our appetite for foreign sleuths shows no sign of waning

WINTER is upon us and once again our dark Saturday nights are dominated by the investigative prowess, emotional turmoil and knitwear choices of a mid-ranking female officer in the Copenhagen police force.

The British appetite for European detectives like Chief Inspector Sarah Lund is insatiable []

This week has seen the start of the third and final series of The Killing, the Danish crime show whose tales of murder in a cold climate have made it a worldwide hit.

Those who prefer something a little hotter and more sultry can turn to Falcon on Sky Atlantic where the "innately sexual and charismatic" Chief Inspector Javier Falcon investigates a killing in the sun-soaked Spanish city of Seville.

The British appetite for European detectives stretches as far back as Hercule Poirot and Inspector Maigret and spans the continent from Spain and Italy in the south to Denmark and Sweden in the north.

In crime novels and in TV detective shows "Nordic noir" currently stands on top of the world. It is a genre characterised by dark, brooding landscapes, plots that slowly and inevitably ratchet up the tension to screaming point, strange, gloomy, damaged loners (that's just the detectives) and complex and bloody narratives that seem to make a link across the ages to ancient Norse sagas.

In crime novels and in TV detective shows "Nordic noir" currently stands on top of the world

When the Killing arrived on our screens last year it was far from obvious that a Danish thriller in 20 subtitled episodes would hold much appeal to British audiences. Yet the nation was gripped, not just by the plot and the relentless single-day-in-an-episode structure but by the character of Sarah Lund.

Lund, played by Sofie Grab l, is a typical fictional detective: driven, aloof, troubled yet brilliant. She is ready to walk away from her job in the police yet remains determined to solve a final, horrifying case: the sadistic murder of a schoolgirl.

YET Lund is more than just another middle-aged misfit on a mission. She's a woman for one thing, a single mother whose past and emotional life remain a mystery yet whose softer, more vulnerable side is somehow symbolised or hinted at by her now-famous chunky woolly jumper.

That knitted white jumper with its black pattern, as Scandinavian as pickled herring, became as essential to the image and mystique of Lund as Sherlock Holmes' deerstalker or Morse's Jaguar. Fans - including the Duchess of Cornwall - acquired replica versions.

When in the first episode of the new series Lund was seen sporting an altogether fluffier and more feminine mohair number there was a palpable sense of shock.

Not only that but her hair was down and she had ditched her sensible flat sleuthing shoes in favour of a pair of heels.

When body parts were found scattered around the docks the single-minded crime-fighter seemed more interested in getting home to cook dinner.

For a while it seemed that Lund might be going soft but as the complexities of the plot began to unfold it was clear that the desire to solve the case was once again exerting its pull.

Lund is not the only dark and driven character in Scandinavian televised crime. The success of The Killing saw the arrival on our screens of Borgen and The Bridge.

Borgen, a political thriller from the same team that made The Killing, features a Lund-like vulnerable politician who becomes the country's first female prime minister. Bleaker than either of them is The Bridge, a Swedish series in which a single-minded female detective hunts down a psychotic serial killer.

Porsche-driving Saga Noren is even by the standards of fictional cops a misfit, blind to social niceties. In one scene we see her whipping off her top in the office, in another she casually propositions a stranger in a bar.

Scandinavia has also given us the brilliant, abused computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) and Jo Nesb¸'s Harry Hole, the alcoholic Norwegian police detective and the Swedish policeman Kurt Wallander, hero of a series of best-selling novels by Henning Mankell.

To British eyes Wallander is recognisably Morse-like, a rumpled, melancholy middle-aged officer with a genius for solving the cases others refuse to touch. His methods bring him into conflict with senior officers so he'll never get promoted but he does get results.

Beyond Scandinavia there is a long tradition of foreign sleuths who have been taken to British hearts. Inspector Maigret, the quintessentially French (laconic, intuitive, enjoys Armagnac and Pernod) commissaire hero of 75 novels by Georges Simenon, has been brought to our screens three times: by Rupert Davies in 1960, eccentrically by Richard Harris in 1988 and by Michael Gambon in the Nineties.

More recently France has been represented by Captain Laure Berthaud of Spiral (Engrenages in French), the scruffy, sexy female head of an otherwise all-male police department who investigates brutal crimes in the gritty Paris banlieues.

The cops take drugs and sleep with suspects, many Gauloises are smoked, nobody is quite who they seem but everyone is imbued with ineffable Gallic style. It's fast, violent and, unlike Laure Berthaud, takes no prisoners.

Italy is represented by Inspector Montalbano, the Sicilian commissario played by Luca Zingaretti, who is bald, unshaven and unapologetically macho, in that way Italian men seem to be able to get away with.

Unusually for a middle-aged TV detective he has a steady girlfriend, the stunning Livia played by Katharina B¶hm.

Belgium has Poirot, definitively portrayed by David Suchet. From the Netherlands we have - well, does anybody but me remember Van der Valk, the cynical Amsterdam detective played by Barry Foster in the Seventies ITV series?

THOUGH set in Amsterdam, Van der Valk was a British series based on novels by Nicholas Freeling. Poirot was of course the hero of many Agatha Christie novels while Javier Falcon is the creation of Robert Wilson, an Englishman resident in Spain.

The late Michael Dibdin wrote a series of novels featuring Italian detective Aurelio Zen, portrayed for the BBC by Rufus Sewell.

The fascination for European detectives lies in the fact that they remind us of our own TV sleuths but with an exotic twist.

If the shows confirm our beliefs about macho Italian men, sexy chain-smoking Frenchwomen, darkly passionate Spaniards and wintry Scandinavians, they can also confound our expectations, giving insights into countries that we may have visited as tourists or know little about.

So we discover that beautiful, historic Seville has a violent criminal underworld, that placid Sweden is still struggling with its Nazi past.

European detective series take on topics that could have jumped off the front pages of British newspapers.

The new series of The Killing explores the global financial crisis; Wallander has touched on immigration and people trafficking Borgen features coalition politics, of all things.

Most importantly of all they are great TV. They address themes of betrayal, anger, corruption, love and hate. The greatest crime fiction, no matter where it is set, has a universal power that transcends borders.